About Meritage

Our Investment Strategy

Because of our hands-on approach, we purposely pursue a limited number of investments. This allows Meritage to devote more resources, energy and time towards accelerating the development of each portfolio company. To enable this hands-on operational involvement, we prefer to be the lead investor and to carefully select our syndicate partners. We are typically the first institutional investor in our companies. Often we start companies in sectors that we have targeted for investment when a suitable investment candidate is not available. Each enterprise must pass our disciplined investment criteria, including a large and growing market opportunity, strong management, a highly effective service offering and scalable service delivery platform, and a significant and sustainable competitive advantage.

Impact Investments

We make only "impact" investments: those with the potential to return a significant portion of the fund's committed capital. We typically commit between $15 and $40 million to a company over the lifecycle of an investment. To generate impact returns, we seek meaningful ownership positions in network-enabled service companies that serve large existing markets or rapidly growing emerging markets. Our preference is to be the lead investor and to hand-select our syndicate partners. We purposely invest in a small number of portfolio companies, which allows our Team to devote more time, energy and resources to accelerating development - and value - of each company.

Multi-Stage Approach

Regardless of investment stage, Meritage always seeks to invest at a point in a company's development that offers: a) the most attractive price-to-value ratio, and b) where operating experience and strategic direction are critical to creating value. Consequently, Meritage actively targets early-stage investments and later-stage transactions involving the refocusing of an existing business such as market consolidations, financial or operational restructurings, control acquisitions and corporate spinouts. Both investment types leverage our core competencies and operating orientation, which uniquely enables us to mitigate investment risks.

FastStart Companies

We're always looking for innovative ideas and great entrepreneurs. Our FastStart Program allows us to capitalize on unique opportunities by investing up to $1 million at the earliest stages of a network-enabled service company's development. We then assist the company in developing its business plan and validating the company's service offering with the intention of "graduating" the company to our portfolio with a larger investment upon proof of concept.

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